


Fast Car

by jouissant



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Holy Water, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 02:12:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19122493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: It wasn’t that Aziraphale had anything against speed.





	Fast Car

_You go too fast for me, Crowley._

Aziraphale could have cursed himself. Crowley had taught him a few, mostly on nights he’d been too drunk to mind the way they burned and tingled in the mouth. He could feel them rolling over his tongue now, poking at his soft palate. He gulped them back, which felt a little like swallowing a cactus. 

It wasn’t that he had anything against speed. He moved quickly all the time. He took black cabs and the Underground. He’d taken a bullet train from Tokyo to eat _omakase_ that still made his mouth water to think of. He could—and did—move through the ether at the speed of a thought or of a heartbeat. Most of these things were actually faster than a 1926 Bentley, so long as it hadn’t been commandeered by a demon with terrible risk management skills.

But no, the problem with the car, with sitting in the car, with sitting in the car with Crowley, with sitting in the car in treacherous proximity to Crowley, who smelled of gunpowder and liquorice—well. Where should he even begin?

* * *

When Crowley got the car, Aziraphale was naturally the first being he showed it to. 

They’d been in Berlin at the time, or rather Aziraphale had; he knew a little hole in the wall off the Lindenstrasse that did a strudel to discorporate for, and if he decided to really tie one on and top off the evening with a bit of cabaret, then surely no one in upper management would be any the wiser. 

He was alone, sitting at a candlelit table with a view of the stage. He had a bottle of rather excellent champagne. There was a young human singing a solo who was quite pleasing to look at; they were dark and slim, and had a heavy hand with kohl eyeliner, which was a look Aziraphale had always appreciated. He was, in a word, content. 

The singer growled into the microphone, the band swelling behind. Aziraphale let his eyes fall closed, but no sooner had he done so than a fall of freezing water struck his cheek, accompanied by the unpleasant ethereal prickling that signaled some dark force or other lurking nearby. Six thousand years on, Aziraphale had come to know this particular quality of lurk exceedingly well. 

“You know, I like this city,” Crowley said. “‘Specially now it’s gotten over that bit of upset and we’ve nothing standing in the way of a decent vintage anymore.” He had plucked the champagne bottle out of its bucket and was holding it up to inspect the label, dribbling icy condensation everywhere. 

“I think you can thank your side for that bit of upset. I seem to remember you taking a pressing business trip to Sarajevo back in 1914.” 

“Yes, well. Lost the coin toss, didn’t I? And anyway, when I got there someone else took over. Auburn hair, about yea long?” He gestured in the vicinity of his armpit. “She had a Bat Roadster motorcycle. Made me ride along in the sidecar.” Crowley sat down beside Aziraphale and took a swig of champagne straight from the bottle. 

Aziraphale grimaced. “Oh, don’t do that, just—here.” A second coupe appeared on the table then, and Aziraphale wrested the bottle from Crowley to pour him a proper glass. 

“A miracle so early in the evening?” 

“Only a minor one,” Aziraphale said. “Barely noticeable.” 

But he looked around them all the same; one never knew who might be watching, and just last month there’d been a visit from Gabriel during which he’d received a very stern talking-to. There was something about Gabriel’s eyes when he really got going that made Aziraphale’s bodily host feel a bit liquid in the bowels. He shuddered and gulped at his champagne. 

“What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked, by way of changing the subject. “I didn’t think you had anything pending on the continent.” 

Crowley sniffed. “I don’t tell you everything.” 

“Of course not,” said Aziraphale. “Nor I you.” He fiddled with a fold of tablecloth and pretended he wasn’t stung. 

There’d been something different about Crowley ever since what Aziraphale had come to think of as the Holy Water Incident of 1862. It was subtle where very little about Crowley was, but that almost made it worse. It was like a drip you could only hear in quiet moments, or an eyelash in your eye. In small doses here and there it was merely irritating. In sum, it was terrible, and the sum was beginning to weigh on Aziraphale. In his weaker moments it made him think of the cascading fountains they’d stuck all over the place upstairs, and how there were absolute lashings of holy water just burbling out of them all of the time, and how, surely, a carafe of the stuff wouldn’t be missed. 

And then he’d come to, spluttering, and tell himself that he really had been hanging around the demon too long. 

Now he stole a glance at Crowley to find him looking at Aziraphale sidelong, with an expression awfully like regret. Which it couldn’t be—demons didn’t regret things, other than perhaps missed opportunities to do their dark lord’s bidding. _What?_ Aziraphale wanted to say. _What is it?_ But then the expression was gone, as though it had discerned his doubt somehow and retreated.

They finished the bottle of champagne. Aziraphale was beginning to feel a little blue, despite the overall mood of the room, for Crowley wasn’t talking, was simply sitting back in his chair and glowering. It was all wrong, to feel this way while drinking something so effervescent. He had a mind to change them over to a moody, well-muscled red, or something that had spent at least half a century in a cask. But at last Crowley sat up and leaned forward, chin in hands. 

“Do you want to know what I’m really doing here?” he asked. 

“Pray tell,” said Aziraphale, who was now pretending not to be relieved. 

Crowley smiled. Across the city, half the streetlights flickered and went out. “I wanted to go for a drive.”

* * *

It was well known among the devoted bibliophiles of central London that A. Z. Fell & Co. kept odd hours. They were so odd, in fact, that the bookshop never appeared to be open at all. The most devoted among them had begun to take shifts loitering outside the shop and falling upon Mr. Fell himself whenever he happened to emerge, at which point a kind of emergency phone tree would activate and bring the others running. On one such occasion Aziraphale had been waylaid by a very earnest gentleman looking for a particular misprinted Bible. He’d been on his way out for a spot of supper, and was trying very hard not to be put out about the delay. 

As the man kept on about this Bible’s particular lambskin cover (rumored to be stained with the blood of an obscure saint, in truth anointed by a clumsy angel knocking over a glass of port after one too many) Aziraphale noticed a couple over his shoulder. They stood out for two reasons: one, they were considerably younger than Aziraphale’s average customer, and two, they were perusing a bookshelf in a way that seemed far too vague and dispassionate to be genuine. They didn’t look, for example, as though they’d club a rival collector over the head with an encyclopaedia and make off with a first edition of Audubon’s _Birds of America_. Not that Aziraphale’s bookshop had ever played host to anything so sordid as that. 

“I’m telling you,” said the young man. “He’s good for it.” 

The girl slid a book from the shelf and began to flip through it. “How’d you know he’s good for it?” she said. “Last guy you said was good for it—” 

“Yeah, yeah. But this guy’s really good for it. He’s some kind of weirdo, you know? Their sort’s always good for it.” 

“It’s holy water, not dirty pictures or something. Why can’t he just march into, I don’t know, St. Bartholomew’s, and nick it for himself?” 

“What does it matter? He can’t. So he’s going to pay us a couple hundred quid to do it for him.”

Holy water. 

Aziraphale gasped. His stomach turned. With a soft popping sound, the sought-after Bible vanished; a few months later it would be discovered, meticulously giftwrapped, beneath the book collector’s Christmas tree. The book the girl was holding slipped from her hands and slid back into its place on the shelf. Simultaneously, each of the patrons milling about the bookshop recalled a pleasant, heretofore forgotten event at which their presence was immediately required. 

Alone again, Aziraphale locked the bookshop door and collapsed into the nearest overstuffed armchair. A pity about the Bible, he thought; as with all of his collection he hadn’t particularly wanted to part with it, but on the spur of the moment he’d been unable to come up with a less benevolent alternative. But no matter. Aziraphale now knew he had far more pressing concerns.

* * *

“So you’ve bought an automobile?” 

“I have,” said Crowley. 

“How interesting,” said Aziraphale. “You know, you haven’t always gotten along with human transportation.” He had looked rather dashing astride a black horse, not that Aziraphale would ever have told him so. Crowley’s horses had always been ill-mannered, prone to spurting gouts of flame at inopportune moments. Aziraphale hadn’t wanted to say anything that might encourage him. 

“This is totally different,” Crowley said. “You’ve got to experience it for yourself.” 

“I have been in a car before.” 

“Not like this, you haven’t.” Crowley’s glasses had slid down his nose, and beyond them his eyes gleamed yellow. “What say you, angel? Going to let me take you for a spin?” 

Aziraphale considered. All about them the room seemed to gleam and bubble. The champagne was finally coming into its own. On stage the lithe, dark singer crooned. The angel felt distracted, suddenly unable to sit still. He should have been annoyed with Crowley disrupting his sojourn, but he found that even with the peculiar emotional hiccup of a few minutes ago he was, quite simply, overwhelmingly pleased to be sitting here beside him. And he wanted to continue to sit beside him, moving at speed through the midnight streets of Berlin. 

He had to admit the Bentley was very impressive. He said as much and watched Crowley preen, running his hand over the car’s glossy flank with a vaguely parental air before opening the passenger door and waving Aziraphale inside. 

“How much did it cost?” asked Aziraphale, as they pulled away from the kerb. 

“Tsk tsk,” said Crowley. “S’impolite, asking about things like that.” 

“Oh, I—” 

“Too much,” said Crowley, with a slinking sort of pride. “But you know, I intend to keep it forever. I expect it to pay for itself eventually. Besides, you can’t take it with you. Money, I mean. A little bird told me that’s about to become particularly true.” 

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Right.” 

He’d heard the same rumblings from his own little bird. He had mixed feelings. Upstairs they made a lot of noise about humanity triumphing in the face of adversity again, but Aziraphale thought it had been pretty well decided that scarcity of any kind tended to bring out the worst in people. More blood and pain and hunger, and always the other side, who made sure the same lucky few ended up on top. 

He sighed. The air between them in the car grew chilled. 

“Sorry,” said Crowley, his voice soft. “Didn’t mean to bring up business.” 

“It seems to be inescapable,” Aziraphale said, but he smiled at Crowley, and made a show of settling deeper into his seat. “You know, it’s a very smooth ride.” 

“Isn’t it? We’re doing a hundred and forty, but you’d never guess.” 

“A hundred and forty!” 

Aziraphale yelped and began to flail about, clawing at Crowley, who began to laugh and wrestle him with one hand while steering with the other. “Heaven help you, Aziraphale, if I crash this car.” 

“You’re a menace!” 

“There, there.” 

Crowley had gotten his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulder under the guise of stilling him. He loosened his grip when he seemed to trust the angel had been sufficiently soothed, but he didn’t move, just left his arm draped there. It felt warm and heavy. It felt lulling. It felt…nice. It was only later, when they’d come back to the cabaret to find the singer still singing, looking ever so slightly singed around the edges, that Aziraphale began to wonder if that was how it felt to be tempted.

* * *

In the end, the holy water was even easier to get than Aziraphale predicted. It just so happened that Heaven was undertaking a series of extensive renovations. Aziraphale didn’t care for them; he was generally of the school of thought that said more was more: more flowers, more gilt, more cherubim. But he was happy to swallow his misgivings about modern design to oversee the installation of a new fountain, which was sleek and marble and practically overflowing with holy water. 

As he dipped his thermos into the fountain he paused. The holy water sparkled with perfect, diamond clarity, flowed through Aziraphale’s fingers like silk. As the thermos filled, his mind was likewise filled: an image of this same water flowing over Crowley, eating at him, burning flesh and bone, burning his very being away like so much acid. He fought the image back, shook his head to dispel it. 

He didn’t know the specifics of Crowley’s plan, but no doubt it was chaotic and foolhardy and dangerous. Aziraphale was generally all for humans, but when he thought of the devil-may-care way the girl had paged through that book he was quite sure he didn’t trust these two as far as he could throw them. Better to handle matters himself, he had decided. More—controlled.

Before he could think better of it, he drew his hand out of the fountain. He screwed the top back onto the thermos and slipped it beneath his coat, and kept his arms crossed tightly over his chest the whole way down the escalator. If worst came to worst, he thought, at least he could say he’d done what his friend had asked. 

Back in the Bentley, Crowley accepted the thermos and stared back at Aziraphale, looking faintly gobsmacked. That look should have made Aziraphale glow with pleasure, for he did so like to surprise Crowley. Instead he felt hollow, with a kind of grasping sensation around the edges that got worse when Crowley said he’d take Aziraphale anywhere he wanted to go. It struck him that over the millennia he couldn’t really recall having ever felt quite so low, and if he had—well, he’d probably have gone to Crowley, who’d have needled him and plied him with drink. He badly wanted to tell him to do just that. _Take me home_ , he’d say, the words sweet and smooth as cream. 

But around them in the car he began to feel the same too-pleasant weight he’d felt that first night he’d been taken for a ride. It draped over and around him like a mantle. He wanted to lie down in it and pull it over him, press his face into it until he couldn’t breathe—

He quailed. 

He spoke, but he didn’t say the words he meant to. Crowley still looked shocked, but now his face began to fall. Aziraphale was not around to see it, for his retreat had sent him scuttling from the car entirely. He was so out of sorts, in fact, vibrating at such a high frequency of distress, that if Crowley had peered out the windshield after him he wouldn’t have see him at all. 

Aziraphale watched the Bentley drive away, neon glistening in its high-shine paint like crude oil. Then he turned and picked his way home along a newly empty street.

* * *

They remained in the cabaret until morning. They’d have left, only the singer hadn’t stopped singing. (“Oh, I do so love this song,” Aziraphale had remarked after their drive, and the singer had obligingly sung it over and over since without ever stopping for a breath.) 

At last Aziraphale gave a sigh of satisfaction. The champagne’s glow had begun to ebb, and while he didn’t sleep he was beginning to feel as though he might be in the mood for a large breakfast. “My dear boy,” he said to Crowley, “I think perhaps we ought to let the poor soul have a rest.” He nodded at the stage. The singer was looking ever so slightly strangled. 

“All right. If you say so.” 

Crowley snapped his fingers and the singer collapsed beside the microphone like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The crowd, who had lingered in the club for reasons they didn’t really understand, broke into bewildered applause. 

As they came outside day was breaking. The Bentley was parked just where they’d left it. Aziraphale looked Heavenwards over the tops of the buildings, staring into a soft spread of pinks and blues and yellows. “It doesn’t look like that up there,” he murmured. “You’d think it would, but you can only really see it from down here.” 

“Up here,” Crowley said. The dawn flickered in his glasses. 

“Here,” said Aziraphale, and took Crowley out to breakfast.


End file.
